Pre-autumn catch up

Nothing much 'birdy' going in my world right now; Bird Fair was great yet frustrating at the same time - working on the stand, I rarely got time to venture off and have a look around myself (lunch breaks aside). Still, lots of fun catching up with a plethora of familiar faces and great to see so many young'uns on the NGB stand.

I've not exactly done much in the way of birding recently with butterflies, flowers, dragonflies - really anything other than birds - taking precedent. It's actually been a pretty decent start to the autumn on the east coast (albeit really lacking that big bird - so far) but, for various reasons, I've missed out on the action entirely.

It was nice to see absolutely loads of Autumn Lady's-tresses over the weekend 30-31 August, both at Greenham Common in Berkshire and at a New Forest site. A fitting way to round off what has been a great year for orchids for me, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the British species in 2015.

August also brought a couple of butterfly ticks - Adonis Blue and Brown Hairstreak. I hope to spend quite a bit more time and effort catching up with and photographing British butterflies next year.

Rather continuing the recent lack of British birding, my plan appears to be to spend much of the coming month out of the country. I'm in Peru from Thursday for nine days until 26 September, back in the country for just under a week and then off to the Azores for the 'usual' fortnight. Just looking at the charts for the coming week and I can't help thinking I'm going to miss something big from the east, but such is life!

I realise that my blogging efforts have been nigh on woeful for the past year or so but life, work etc have just gotten in the way. I'll do my very best to rectify this in the near future and I hope to post daily from the Azores at least. Here's hoping for more of this ... though the Atlantic has been spectacularly quiet so far this autumn!